Serene sound to aid the soul

Charles Lloyd uses his sax, band to deliver a balm at Jazz Showcase

September 20, 2001|By Howard Reich, Tribune arts critic.

It would be difficult to imagine music much more consoling or cathartic than the sounds that came out of Charles Lloyd's tenor saxophone Tuesday night. By turns anguished and serene, Lloyd's solos clearly were aimed at an audience still gripped by the events of last week in New York City and Washington.

Yet for those who didn't pick up the message right away, Lloyd spelled it out.

"We just got back from playing three nights in New York," he told the audience at the Jazz Showcase. "It was very moving--more than I really can say in words."

That didn't matter, however, since Lloyd said plenty through his horn.

Even under the best of circumstances, Lloyd's music carries a palpable spirituality, his wide-open sound, long-held notes and passages of rhythmic stasis transcending the bebop and hard-bop idioms one usually encounters at the Showcase. When Lloyd played the Chicago Jazz Festival last year, the very nature of his sound--a gauzy tone that somehow cuts through any instrumental accompaniment--proved disarming.

But to hear Lloyd in an intimate space and under the circumstances in which Americans now find themselves was to savor Lloyd at his most effective.

At first, Lloyd disarmed his listeners with precisely the music most probably had come to hear. The long and sinuous lines, slightly tart tone, utter avoidance of vibrato and gloriously slow chordal movement represented jazz improvisation at its most introspective and mystical. With guitarist John Abercrombie producing comparably free-flowing strands of melody, drummer Billy Hart using brushes to emphasize color over backbeat and bassist Larry Grenadier giving this haze of sound its anchor, Lloyd's quartet provided some of the most ethereal ensemble work one might hope to hear.

Yet Lloyd and friends soon moved in other directions, playing a slow blues with all the ferocity one might experience at a South Side saloon--but with decidedly less volume. Even so, to hear Lloyd and Abercrombie play cross-rhythms virtually in opposition to one another, all the while thickening the ensemble textures with extended blues chords, was to understand that there's so much more to Lloyd's latter-day work than simply its soothing lyricism.

As if to underscore the point, the quartet eventually plunged wholly into free-jazz improvisation, churning up the kind of crashing dissonance that is not normally heard at the Showcase. Yet even at its most turbulent, Lloyd's quartet proved considerably less abrasive than many bona fide avant-garde bands, perhaps because each player took pains not to drown out any of the others. The resultant music was rhythmically volatile and melodically free-ranging but never a direct assault on the ear.

If none of last week's events had taken place, this still would have been a riveting set. But in light of all that has happened, Lloyd's show--with its enormous emotional range--proved nothing less than therapeutic.The Charles Lloyd Quartet plays through Sunday at the Jazz Showcase, 59 W. Grand Ave., Chicago; 312-670-2473.

Jazz note: Next Wednesday's show by the protean Cuban pianist Ernan Lopez-Nussa at the Getz Theatre of Columbia College Chicago has been canceled due to recent difficulties in air transportation.